Initial reports suggested that it would simply be a repackaging of the 14 existing region 1 releases, along with a bonus 15th disc of new material.

However, a new press releases has confirmed that although the DVDs will still contain the previously releases extras, the film transfers will be new digitally re-mastered versions.

Universal Studios Home Video have announced the Region 1 DVD release of Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection for 4th October 2005 priced at $119.98 SRP. This 15 Disc collection brings together 14 Hitchcock classics plus a bonus disc in a special gift set collection.

All 14 films are digitally re-mastered for the best quality ever with all bonus features from the existing releases carried across. The films are: Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubth, Rope, Rear Window, The Trouble With Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy and Family Plot.

The all-new bonus disc showcases Hitchcock’s films, career and legacy, while the set is presented in ultra-premium velvet packaging which includes a 36-page collectible book.[source: DVD Times]

Hopefully this will mean anamorphic US releases of Psycho and Vertigo!

HIP3 contains some JavaScript that sets the focus to the search box everytime a page is loaded – this means you can start typing text straight in to the box.

However, if you’ve already done a search, then it can be frustrating for the user to have the page suddenly jump to the top (especially if they are using the back button to return to a list of search results). In fact, it make more sense for the JavaScript to only set the focus on the initial search screens.

Here’s a quick hack that disables the JavaScript “setfocus” function for search result and full bib pages:

Open up searchresponse.xsl file and find the <body> tag (it’s around line 230)

A few lines down you’ll find the onload attribute code – this tells the web browser to execute the startTimer and setfocus JavaScript functions as soon as the page has loaded:

I noticed that this version of “Mary” is being sold on eBay for ?10. My advice is “don’t bother” – if you want a copy of the film before it gets released on DVD, then you can download it for free from the eDonkey peer-to-peer network.

Just looking at the weblogs for May 2005 and it was the busiest month yet for the site – for the first time ever, the site used over 3GB of bandwidth.

Not surprisingly, the majority of the bandwidth was taken up with images (2.42GB of JPGs, GIFs & PNGs).

There’s also been an increase in the number of people trying to link directly to images hosted on the site (known as leeching), but the web site is set up to disallow that so they’ll normally see this instead:

By my reckoning, there are 16,975 images on the site. Of those, 3,522 are DVD screen grabs and hi-res DVD packaging scans.

A bit thanks to everyone out there who’s spread the word about the site – it always gives me a little buzz to see people linking back to the site 🙂